1. Field of the Invention
The technical field of the invention is routing and distributed traffic engineering.
2. Background
The invention refers to traffic engineering means of a telecommunication device in a telecommunication network, said traffic engineering means being enabled to determine a traffic distribution being a traffic share for each one of a set of paths between a source and a destination of said telecommunication network, said traffic distribution being adjusted on at least one of the following events: a timer expires, load-losses information related to the critically-loaded link has been received, and to a method to generate a traffic distribution being a traffic share for each one of a set of paths between a source and a destination of that network, that traffic distribution being adjusted on at least one of the following events: the pre-set time has expired; load-losses information related to the critically-loaded link has been received.
For routing and engineering distributed data traffic a known method is Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) Optimized Multi-Path (OMP), shortly OSPF-OMP. This is described in an Internet-Draft by Curtis Villamizar dated Feb. 18, 1999 with the title: “OSPF Optimized Multi-Path (OSPF-OMP)”. OSPF routers exchange only topology information describing the topology of the network. In addition thereto, OMP routers exchange also load and losses information. They calculate several paths to each destination and split the load i.e. the information to be transported among these paths according to load and losses information.
Load adjustment may be triggered by two events: by expiration of a timer, or when load-losses information related to the critically-loaded link is received. Both criteria work in combination. The known load adjustment algorithm (as described in Appendix “B4 Adjusting Load” of the above mentioned draft of Villamizar) causes extensive computational consumption and are very complex. It is difficult to tune, and not applicable to other networks since the algorithm uses a lot of parameters adapted for the special network. The complexity of the algorithm makes it difficult to be understood by implementers and/or deployers. Especially known algorithms comprise heuristic parameters which are the result of time consuming try and error methods.